The power of plants NATURE HEALED MY PAIN
Ge or gina felt compelled to create her Kiwi cures
When bad things happened to little Georgina Langdale – very bad things indeed – she would find solace in nature. Escaping to the woods near the home she grew up in Bath, England, Georgina would choose a tree and press her body against it.
“I’d hug that tree and believe I was almost becoming one with it,” she recalls. “I would feel healed by its energy. During my toughest times, it’s the natural environment that has helped me through.”
Aged five, Georgina was being sexually abused by friends of the family. But the horrific experience – culminating in a rape at age seven – was to affect the rest of her kaleidoscopic life. Now in her 50s, Georgina is the founder of Archeus, a natural skincare company that’s built on helping others through traumas and transitions.
Archeus is the zenith of many years of pottering about with “aromatherapy, herbalism and bach flower remedies”, says Georgina, who works out of a studio set among an array of plants, flowers and her beloved trees overlooking Napier.
Powerless to tell anyone about the abuse she was suffering, Georgina was freed from any further occurrences when she was eight and her parents made a sudden decision to move to Hawke’s Bay. Here, she felt instantly at home. “As a kid and an only child, I thought it was the best thing ever – open space, beautiful farms – and I started to develop a very deep physical pull to the land.”
Life took another sidestep when, at 18, Georgina finished her schooling and began her travels – first to Australia, then back to the UK to work in public relations. “But I missed nature,” she tells, “so I’d go poking around Covent Garden’s trendy shops looking for remedies – nature in a pot!”
Then Georgina moved into a role managing a cultural communications agency, where she rubbed shoulders with the most famous dancers, musicians and artists of the ’80s, before nabbing a position in Germany with the United Nations’ environment programme.
Throughout her years overseas, one particularly close friend, Malcolm McLaren, the founder of the Sex Pistols, became her confidant and sounding board.
“He was rather merciless,” smiles Georgina, “but so brilliant that if I had an idea for something, I’d let it run the gauntlet with Malcolm. His best advice to me was that I should remain true to myself no matter what – authenticity was really big for him. He died in 2010, as I was on a flight from Germany, coming home to New Zealand to consider the next chapter of my life.”
Magicpotions
That chapter was Archeus. The business is named, says Georgina, “for the vital force that runs through the universe”, and it’s not just face creams and cleansers she creates, but also products that treat very specific issues, like vaginal dryness. “A woman came to see me and said, ‘I’m in menopause and one of the symptoms is not very pleasant!’” Georgina laughs. “She asked if I could make something completely natural for her, so I spent a long time macerating herbs in camellia oil, and adding jojoba and other soothing ingredients.”
The product was a resounding success. “I now receive emails from women all over, saying, ‘Georgina, you’ve saved my marriage!’”
Equally popular is her tattoo after-care balm, which uses shea and calendula to soothe agitated skin. And her Botanic Repair Balm, recently short-listed for the Pure Beauty Global Awards in Dubai, is “perfect for scarring or for women who are coming through something like chemotherapy and need a calming balm for lips and nipples. It contains chickweed and beautiful things like St John’s wort.”
Georgina is also passionate about the transition from life to death. She reminisces about nursing her own mother before she passed away three years ago.
“I learned how valuable touch is at that end stage,” she says. “In some cases, it’s the only thing a family member can give, particularly if their loved one is in a highly medicalised environment. But I also know it can feel awkward, so I’ve made anointing oils to enable that touch to happen more freely.”
The oils, made with frankincense and myrrh, evoke “a wonderful millennia
of history. They’re perfect for a gentle hand or foot massage.”
She’s also making burial shrouds infused with lavender for peace and rosemary for remembrance “to allow a loved one to die in a state of grace”.
As to her own most recent transition, Georgina says she has never felt more liberated. She smiles widely, espousing the many positives of moving through menopause.
“As a childless woman, I’ve found it takes all those ‘Oh, it could still happen!’ moments away,” says Georgina, who married her partner Al Morrison in a small winery celebration last year. “I never actively wanted to have children, but I never actively didn’t either. I was probably a bit scared, after what had happened to me as a kid. I would have been a maddeningly overprotective mother!”
Al, formerly the Department of Conservation’s DirectorGeneral, is hugely supportive of his wife’s work “although often bemused by it”, Georgina laughs. “Every time he gets a cut or a bee sting, I’m off running into the garden and coming back with a leaf saying, ‘Here, put this on it.’ I’d be a good person to take tramping.”
Guided by what’s in her garden, with plants as her protector, and Mother Nature her nurturer and healer, Georgina says she’s no longer owned by her childhood story.
“Some people use alcohol or drugs to help them through pain,” she concludes, “but I always believed I could do it instead with my connection to the energy of nature.”